Friday 24 February 2012 17.39 EST
First published on Friday 24 February 2012 17.39 EST

This wonderful selection, drawing on Khalvati's five previous books as well as new material, is full of moving, quietly insightful meditations on family and domestic spaces, on routines and daily rhythms.

One of the outstanding pieces, "Sundays", has a typically accomplished intimacy and directness. There's a sense here of poetry as something restorative, a means of gauging a fragile balance between safety and threat ("And suddenly / there's sunshine, brightness and a bounce / and his fingers are dancing. Voices / might bedevil him but voices also // save him").

Other more wide-ranging poems provide explorations of history and nationality, but these are frequently rooted in the near at hand, the glimpse of sudden, elusive perspectives. The sonnet sequence "The Meanest Flower", for example, relishes such shifting intimate dynamics as it swerves between images of childhood and motherhood.

The book is divided into five parts, the first four ordered autobiographically (rather than by date of composition). And it is the pieces about Khalvati's childhood on the Isle of Wight that, in many ways, are the most successful – the isolation conjured in "Writing Home" and "Writing Letters", the use of landscape and careful symbolism in "The Chine", the clarity and poise of "Rubaiyat", an elegy for her grandmother.

"Iowa Daybreak", one of the more recent works from the book's last section, provides a sustained and thoughtful exploration of Khalvati's approach. The lyricism has a tremendous delicacy and self-awareness. At its centre she contrasts her own close-range aesthetic with Emily Dickinson's visions of "the dark and deep" - "Depths were never truths I reached. / More, the quiet monotony I never // thought of as monotony / but peace. Nothing I loved more / than making torn things whole."